Good Help is Hard to Find We’re having a bitch of a time lately hiring good sales people. We’re growing like crazy this year and are trying to invest more in our salesforce, but it’s not easy. And we’re a good catch. Good brand, healthy company, good comp and benefits, charming CEO, the works. I just traded emails with a friend who is CEO of another online marketing services firm who said the same thing, with the exact same explanation I have: I have been so unimpressed with everyone from our space (weak links drop out, mediocrity churns from company to company, and true talent is retained). Anyway, we have gotten very lucky with a few key hires the past…
Category
Leadership
Listen Up!
Listen Up! I’ve always felt that the ability to listen (and the related ability to ask smart questions) is highly underrated in business, while presentation and speaking skills tend to be overrated. We practice the art of SPIN Selling at Return Path, which is a sales methodology based on asking questions and listening rather than constantly pounding features and benefits. And boy, does it work. When done well, sales close much more quickly and prospects/clients are much more engaged because they really understand the need that they have for our services. The same principles apply to management and leadership as well. While you certainly have to be somewhat authoritative and clear thinking as a leader, it’s almost always better to…
Book Shorts: Sales, Sales, Sales, Sales, Sales
Book Shorts: Sales, Sales, Sales, Sales, Sales Jeffrey Gitomer’s Little Red Book of Selling and Little Red Book of Sales Answers were great refreshers in sales basics for you as CEO (and head of sales, and sales manager, and sales rep). The books were a bit “self-help” flavor for my taste as a reader, but they were excellent on content, and I have two long pages of notes of “back to basics” items I need to remind myself and my team about. Anyone at Return Path in sales/account-project management/marketing — your copy is on the way, hopefully by way of a barter I proposed with the author (sorry, Stephanie and Tami…), but in any case, we’ll buy them. Anyone else…
Counter Cliche: Sometimes You Need a Shortstop
Counter Cliche: Sometimes You Need a Shortstop Fred’s Chiche of the Week this week is about drafting the best available (corporate) athlete. I think he’s right lots of the time, especially in startup companies where people need to wear multiple hats. And it might also be a good rule of thumb in larger companies, when you want to have flexibility to move managers around from group to group and get them to easily take on new challenges or responsibilities. But sometimes, you just need a shortstop, and if you were the GM of a baseball team, your manager or owner would be pretty ticked off if you went out and hired a decathlete for the job. Companies who are in…
My 360 on Your 360
My 360 on Your 360 Last year, I wrote about the 360 review process we do at Return Path, which is a great annual check-in on staff development and leadership/management. In Part I of What a View, I described the overall process. In Part II, I talked specifically about how my review as CEO worked, which is a little different. This year, we changed the format of our reviews in two ways. First, for senior staff, we continued to do the live, moderated discussions, but we dropped having people also fill out the online review form. It was duplicative, and the process already consumes enough time that we decided to cut that part out, which I think worked well. Second,…
Doing Well By Doing Good, Part III
Doing Well By Doing Good, Part III In Part I of this series, I blogged about my friend Raj Vinnakota and his amazing adventure starting the SEED School and Foundation in Washington, D.C. In Part II, I extended the conversation to some of the things we do at Return Path to help make the world a better place — even though our business model is less “inherently virtuous” than that of many other organizations, particularly non-profits. One thing we did last fall in the wake of the hurricane devastation on the Gulf Coast was pledge to send one or two groups down to New Orleans with Habitat for Humanity to assist in the recovery and reconstruction efforts, giving people the…
Counter Cliche: Pick a Geek Term
Counter Cliche: Pick a Geek Term Fred has a good cliche this week — he talks about how an organization has a particular "clock speed" and needs to hire people who can operate at that speed. I agree whole-heartedly but have always referred to this exact thing in a different way. We have always said when we’ve acquired another company that we need to "port that company onto our Operating System." So pick your favorite geek term, but I like the notion of porting someone to another operating system better because it implies that people can change a little bit more.
Book short: Myers-Briggs Redux
Book short: Myers-Briggs Redux Instinct: Tapping Your Entrepreneurial DNA to Achieve Your Business Goals, by Tom Harrison of Omnicom, is an ok book, although I wouldn’t rush out to buy it tomorrow. The author talks about five broad aspects of our personalities that influence how we operate in a business setting: Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. These traits are remarkably similar to those in the popular Myers-Briggs Type Indicator that so many executives have taken over the years. It’s not just that you want to be high, high, high, high, and low in the Big 5. Harrison asserts that successful entrepreneurs need a balance of openness and conscientiousness in order to be receptive to new ideas, but…
Agile Marketing
Agile Marketing As I wrote about last week, Return Path has been using the Agile Development methodology and Rally Software as our product development framework for about a year now. It’s worked so well for us, that the concepts, and even the tools, have started to spread virally to other parts of our business. About two months ago, I took over our marketing department as interim CMO. Our marketing efforts have become increasingly complex in the last year or so as we’ve grown and added multiple new product lines, and as a result, the demands on our relatively small department were becoming unmanageable. As I wrote about a couple years ago, Marketing is like French Fries — you can always…
Agile Development
Agile Development Sometime last year, our engineering and product teams embraced the Agile Software Development framework. Without going into too much detail (here’s the Wikipedia entry for those who want it), the concept of Agile Development is to run software development in small pieces with a focus on more communication between product and development teams resulting in collaborative requirements development. This leads to a “release early and often” environment where there are continual improvements. For us, we group development projects now into a “release” that consists of a series of usually six, two-week “iterations.” The release planning and iteration planning meetings are reasonably long meetings that involve the major stakeholders, product management and engineering. The process also includes a very…
Book Short: Which Runs Faster, You or Your Company?
Book Short: Which Runs Faster, You or Your Company? Leading at the Speed of Growth, by Katherine Catlin at the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership is a must read for any entrepreneur or CEO of a growth company. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read targeted to that audience – its content is great, its format is a page-turner, and it’s concise and to the point. The authors take you through three stages of a growth company’s lifestyle (Initial Growth, Rapid Growth, and Continuous Growth) and describe the “how to’s” of the transition into each stage: how you know it’s coming, how to behave in the new stage, how to leave the old stage behind. I didn’t realize…